CSH Talk by Sebastian Poledna: “Economic forecasting with an agent-based model”

Join us for a talk by Sebastian Poledna from IIASA and CSH Associate Faculty on June 23 at 2:15 pm in Seminar Room 101 on “Economic forecasting with an agent-based model”.

Abstract:

We develop an agent-based model (ABM) for the Austrian economy using data from national accounts, input-output tables, government statistics, census data, and business surveys. The model incorporates all economic activities (producing and distributive transactions) as classified by the European system of accounts (ESA). All economic entities, i.e. all juridical and natural persons, are represented by agents (at a scale of 1:10). We show that this model is able to compete with vector autoregressive (VAR) and autoregressive–moving-average (ARMA) models in out-of-sample prediction. Potential applications of this ABM include economic forecasting, as well as the prediction of responses of the economy to endogenous shocks, e.g. from the financial system, or exogenous shocks like natural disasters, transformative technological innovations, or unintended consequences of political interventions such as subsidies and tax policies.